The Future of the Women's Movement/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
SEX-ANTAGONISM
(2) Woman's Part
"They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,—
They rightly do inherit Heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence."
IF men have made the mistake of attempting to repress women, we must admit that women have taken their share of the sex war in attempting to get the better of men. Men have insisted that women shall live by their sex alone, and women have used their sex in every conceivable way to accomplish their ends. Men have drawn ring-fences round women and then twitted them with their narrowness. Men have had to bow to the necessity of women bearing and rearing children, but whereas this is a work requiring the broadest culture and the widest sympathies, men have for ages restricted women's culture and cramped women's sympathies. Full of vitality and personality, women have felt the heavy hand of brute force upon them, and like all live persons, they have either fretted and rebelled (which, when it is done by a woman, is called nagging), or they have circumvented the oppressor by wiles and lies. True, women have impotently raged against men, and, true, it is a pity. If you are weak and ignorant, your rage will, half the time, be not only impotent, but directed against the wrong things and the wrong persons. True, women have lied to men and cheated them, and some of these women have been the most successful in twisting men round their little fingers, while the incurably honest women have looked on in disgust and despair. But no one can say that women have abused men more than men have abused women—all literature and history proves the reverse. No one can say that women have lied to men more than men have lied to women; the deserted girl-mothers are the witnesses.
All these mistakes are due to selfishness, and this is a human, not a sex characteristic. It is always a difficult matter for each individual person to determine when self-expression and self-development merge into selfishness, and there is no short way and no simple rule by which it can be determined. One must allow that men have greater natural temptations to be selfish, owing to physical differences between them and women, and the education of boys, instead of, as now, enhancing the force of these temptations, should be directed to counteracting them. The physical circumstances of motherhood, for instance, do not allow a woman to escape the consequences of the sexual act as a man can. It requires more imagination for a man to realise the cruelty of deserting a baby than it does for a woman to realise it. The baby reminds her. So we find that women less often desert their babies than men do. A healthy public opinion would stimulate the man's imagination in this direction. Again, man's greater physical strength makes it more easy for him to bully a woman than for her to bully him. When, by chance, a woman is physically stronger than a man, she does not always refrain from using her force unchivalrously. If it be true that a man has stronger appetites than a woman, this again increases his temptations; but one must, if one allows this circumstance, also allow that it may give the woman an advantage, and so tempt her to bully the man in her way, and there is no doubt some women yield to this temptation. I sometimes see, in the very cruelty of men to women, a hidden agony of fear lest, ultimately, women should need men less than men need women. If this be true on the purely animal plane, nothing could be further from the truth, if we take the whole human creature into account, and men who, by brutality (the result of fear and the cause of fear, too), kill the higher attractions of which they are capable, are making a tremendous miscalculation; for they might attain by the one what they altogether miss by the other; and this is going in the future to be more so, not less. The women of the future will have men on terms, or go without, and the terms must be the only honourable terms, of love and liberty and mutual service. A man will find he has no need to preach wifely submission to the woman whose love he has won, and he will find that he does not want it either.
Alarmists declare that the women's movement has caused sex-antagonism. The preceding chapter has, I think, disposed of such an absurd contention, and most thoughtful persons do not defend a statement so easily refuted by literature and history. Others, with more evidence, maintain that sex-antagonism was there, a kind of sleeping dog, which the women's movement has now aroused to vicious attack. It is contended that the progressive women have stirred up normal women to rebellion, which they never would, of themselves, have contemplated; that the progressives are mischief-makers, who have put dangerous ideas into the heads of people quite unable to carry them out, and the only result will be unrest, disputes, discomfort for men, misery for women, and a final vindication of the supreme authority of man. The progressives will probably suffer severe castigation, but the normal women will be kissed and forgiven, for, after all, they are only women and not quite accountable for their actions; and, besides, men are really rather fond of the silly things. This is the style of the commoner leader-writer in the anti-suffrage newspapers.
We may grant at once that the women's movement would not be where it is but for its leaders. This is no less true of the women's than of all other movements. A movement does not really get going until leaders have arisen from the ranks; the absurd mistake is to suppose that a movement can be kept going for any prolonged time by the leaders only, without support from the ranks. For many years, the women found it exceedingly difficult to raise up leaders from their own ranks, and a very considerable lead was, as a matter of fact, given by men. But until women had arisen who could carry on the leadership, progress was slow, partial and almost entirely academic. If John Stuart Mill's searching analysis of women's position had not made women think for themselves; if his disgust and shame had raised no answering disgust and shame in women, they would have proved themselves fit for the position they were in, and would never have begun to stir out of it. And about that time there were other men too, ready to help, William Lloyd Garrison and Walt Whitman and Mazzini and Stansfeld and Henry Sidgwick, and all the other people who did the pioneer work of helping the women to get education and training, and of opening up careers to them. Then, although the active reformers among men have been comparatively recent, there have been great artists, from the earliest times, who have held the mirror up to man and shown him his deeds towards woman. No feminist tract can compare for propaganda purposes with The Trojan Women, or Medea. Tell a woman she has no concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times who have read its causes. If it were not so, we might despair of the true causes ever appearing to all.
If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of the war on the women's side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature. It is a sorry picture that is presented to us, of the "womanly" woman cajoling and bamboozling a man into complaisance, and that state of things cannot be described as peace, while the present state of friction is called war. There are elements of warfare in both, but the first was underhand and corrupting, while the foolish elements of the present condition are patent and, as I believe, temporary. I believe this because I feel pretty sure that there is enough fairness in the mass of men for them not permanently to resist what is just in the women's claim, once the women make it plain; and secondly, because what has been foolish or wrong in the women's movement is the result of the old folly and wrong which the movement as a whole is directed against: the folly of trying to make legislative action precede education, and the wrong of fighting evil with evil, the age-long error of retaliation.
One must grant that one hears a great deal more of sex-antagonism now than one did even ten years ago; certainly much more than one did a quarter of a century ago. But if anyone will take the trouble to compare the debates in the House of Commons twenty-five years ago with the debates now, and note the difference of tone when women are mentioned, he cannot avoid being struck by the fact that the thing is getting more talked about now, just because it is going. The old contempt for women has largely gone, and has been replaced by a most serious, if considerably bewildered effort to understand what the women would be at. It does not lie in the mouths of men who built or maintained in the House the monkey cage, which goes by the euphemistic name of the Ladies' Gallery, to assert that there was no antagonism; those men both feared and despised women. The cage will go when Englishmen realise (it takes them some time) how ridiculous they appear to all the world by exhibiting themselves as in terror of their own women.
In many other ways women feel the antagonism less, and one improvement of the utmost importance to them is the enormous increase in their liberty of going about without molestation from men. When I was a girl, it was considered rather a bold thing for a lady to walk unescorted within the precincts of the City of London, and there were very few restaurants where she would have been safe from rudeness. Consider who offered this rudeness: men. And why? because, though the woman was doing an absolutely harmless thing, she was singular, and it was assumed that she did it from an improper motive and was therefore fair game; or still more simply, because the cruel lust of tormenting a helpless creature was irresistible. What woman who has moved an inch out of shelter, but has encountered this?
Still, the antagonism is much less than it was. How is it that we hear more of it? The chief reason is a very simple one: women's griefs have become reasoned and articulate. Whereas women were fighting man by wiles and arts, they are now appealing to his reason and finding words for their appeal, while a few, exasperated, are hitting out rather wildly with man's own weapons. In order to appeal to men's reason, women have had to find words for their grievances and their differences, and to give words to a thing always makes it ten times as important as it was. The unreasonable man points to the inarticulate women and invites you to note how satisfied they are; he then points to the articulate ones and cries shame on them for fomenting sex-war. To the unreasonable man, it is impossible ever to demonstrate women's grievances, for to do so is at once to be reproached with being " anti-man "; yet surely even he might admit that to err is human. If he had a little of the gift of humour, he might profitably consider the eighteenth-century treatment of women, and ask himself if it is really not rather funny that he should be so hurt when women at last find tongue to say what they think of the rare old sport of woman-baiting. When the admirable Sir Charles Grandison ejaculates, "Were it not, my dear ladies, for male protectors, to what insults, to what outrages, would not your sex be subject?" he was not overstating the case against the men of that day. It was not against the other forces of nature, against hunger or cold, or wild beasts that women most needed protection; it was against insult and outrage from man. Man was, by far, woman's most formidable enemy and most terrible danger. Women are frequently invited to bewail the death of chivalry.: What chivalry meant, in these days, was the protection by individual men of their own women against the depredations of other men. If a woman had no "protector" of her own, or if he chanced to be a tyrant, she remained unprotected by the State. The growth of a healthier opinion among men has now greatly reduced the number of men who desire to "outrage and insult" women, and has greatly increased the State protection of women. There will perhaps always be some few men of primeval instincts, or what is worse, of primeval instincts corrupted by modernity; but it is for civilised men to reduce them as far as they can, to control those that cannot be civilised, and surely not to become their apologists.
The development in England that is known as militancy is, so far, peculiar to England, and is the result of the political situation and of the temperament and character of two women, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, acting upon it. The fiery and self-willed nature of Mrs. Pankhurst made her a person to whom half-measures and compromises have always been repugnant. Her deep and passionate sex-pride gave her an eloquence and an attractive force which drew thousands of women to her. She voiced in a language new to the timid and the ladylike, all the revolt that was gnawing at the hearts of women. To many women it must have seemed that their deepest unuttered thoughts and the unuttered thoughts of generations of women had found expression, and anyone who has had this experience, knows what intense devotion is felt towards the person who has the courage and the genius to utter the words. If Mrs. Pankhurst alone had inspired the militant movement, it would have been at once a nobler and a more terrible thing than it has proved. The machine, that wonderful engine of advertisement and ingenuity, was the work of other minds. Doubtless it was the machine which served to make the lightning progress of the militant movement in its first years; it has been the machine, however, which has largely been responsible for the disasters of recent times. What was great and noble has become inextricably entangled with what the public has come to regard as a gigantic fake, and consequently the attitude of the public is either one of amusement, to see what fresh trick ingenuity will invent, what fresh show will be presented to the gaping crowd, or of exasperation at what seems to them like pointless mischief. The clever exploiting of the psychology of mobs did not go deep enough, and was, in truth, far too cynical. There is an appalling amount of mob spirit (not by any means confined to the common people, but to be seen even in the House of Commons), and many of the militant devices have successfully appealed to this; but no reform worth having was ever won from the mob, and it is the tragic truth that much of the deeper meaning of the most selfless and devoted sacrifice on the part of individual women has been hidden by the very advertisement which it has received.
When the Women's Social and Political Union sprang into public view some eight years ago, the time was certainly ripe for a revival. Some people still think that the Union has done nothing but harm. This has always seemed to me an unreasonable opinion. Undoubtedly they made other work extraordinarily difficult in some ways, and for a time. They captured the press, but, since they did not win the approval of the press for their object, but only secured notices by their sensationalism, it was, for some years, actually more difficult for other workers to get any publicity at all for their views or their work. The report of a street row always gets precedence of the report of a peaceful meeting, and the result of this was that, for some years, the newspapers were filled with reports of militancy, while their columns showed nothing of the great and steady growth of the non-militant movement, nor did they even do justice to the educational side of the militants' work. This condition of things was in itself intensely provocative, and nothing is a more striking example of women's level-headedness and far-sightedness than the fact that the enormous mass of suffragists refused to be provoked to any unconsidered act of retaliation. Some of them had the political sense to note that the newspapers which gave most prominence to militancy were those most hostile to women's suffrage.
It would take very much more space than I have, thoroughly to argue the pros and cons of militancy, to distinguish its different forms, and to disentangle its motives. Like all great movements, this one contains people who have joined it for very different motives, and some of the arguments by which it has been defended are mutually destructive. Its greatest achievement in my opinion is that it woke people up and opened their purses, in a way totally unprecedented. It made those who had never cared realise that some women cared intensely, and made them ask why. It made those who had been working for long years realise that there were many yet untried methods, and that some of them were good. Above all, it made many women feel that, if they desired the enfranchisement of women, and if they did not like the methods of the W.S.P.U., the only respectable thing to do was to work as hard, and give as much for what they thought right, as these other women did. To the constitutional suffragists, it is a matter of complete indifference who gets the credit, when the vote is won; but it is a matter of the utmost import to them, not only that the vote should be won, but that both women and men should be prepared to make the best use of so great a reform.
Something can, of course, be done by telling people they are ready. This is what the early militants did. There was no real opposition in the country; there was a very large favourable majority in the House, and there had been a majority since 1886. One can quite conceive a revival which would in a few years have carried mere inertia. What happened was that the W.S.P.U. inflamed a party against the movement, and this party was the one which by its first principles was actually pledged to support the movement. Temper, party advantage, personal loyalties were all aroused; but, instead of being aroused for the suffrage movement, they were inflamed against it. It was to be war. All possible peaceful methods had, we were told, been tried and had failed. (This was, of course, the great and fundamental untruth. The work up to that time had not had anything like the popular appeal of recent years.) At first, by skilful advertisement, it almost seemed as if elections might be lost and won by these means, and some alarm was felt in party circles; but it did not take long to show that there were very few men who were going to vote against their party at the command of the militant suffragists, and the cry of "Keep the Liberal out!" became ineffective. It caused the maximum of irritation and the minimum of effect.
The militant campaign would have succeeded if the majority of women, even perhaps if the majority of suffragists, had backed it. I am not afraid of making this concession, holding, as I do, that the enormous majority of women kept out of the militant movement from ethical considerations. It is not easy to bring the ethical case against the militants, because they themselves waver incessantly between two positions. Sometimes they are soldiers, fighting a battle, inflicting damage, having a "siege of Whitehall" (to quote from one of their posters), "proving that women can fight." Sometimes they are martyrs, who do injury to no one but themselves; who merely refuse to be governed without their consent; who have adopted the Oriental device of dying on their enemy's doorstep. Now this second policy is the very reverse of the first, and the only thing that can be said against it is, that it is an extreme measure which should on no account be undertaken, until ordinary methods of education and organisation have been fully tried. To become a martyr as soon as you can't get your own way, is a form of spiritual bullying that is extraordinarily exasperating.
But the first policy cuts away the whole ground upon which the women's demand is based; upon this ground not only would men infallibly beat women, but the great mass of women, as well as men, would feel that the militant women had invited defeat. When Mrs. Leigh adjures her women hearers to use their nails upon the eyes of men who attempt to arrest them, does she not know that this could only succeed for as long as the men disbelieved the women's intentions? As soon as the men apprehended real danger, they could effectively dispose of the women. Even if it were not wrong, it would be futile in the extreme. But it is wrong, inexcusably wrong, on the part of women, whose experience of life ought to have proved to them that for women to invite physical force against themselves is to provoke all the forces of reaction against which their movement is, in reality, directed. Long years ago, men threw stones and filth at women who asked for enfranchisement. Gradually public opinion killed out this hooliganism. Then came the militants, and, bysmashing windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that, for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by, turn to see it ugly in themselves.
It is hypocrisy, of course, for men to say that they refuse women's claims because some women have been violent, firstly, because they refused them just the same, before women became violent; secondly, because only a few women have been violent; thirdly, because the vote was not given to men as a reward for their abstinence from violence. In fact, the brutalities of anti-suffragists might make the more sensitive Antis cease, for very shame, to reproach the other side with violence, their own side having been guilty of personal assaults of the most disgusting nature.
Men have not yet given women the vote, partly because they are very slow to move and indifferent about women's questions; partly because they are still somewhat fearful of what women may do; but chiefly because no political party has yet seen a clear party gain to be made by it. This last, which has been the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of this reform, will be its great safeguard once it has been won. The women's vote would be on a precarious tenure if it were won by one party in the teeth of the bitter opposition of the whole of the other party. The peaceful and fruitful use of the vote depends upon a general conversion of the country to the principles involved. Representative institutions can only work well by common consent and goodwill.
Militants sometimes defend their violence by saying how trivial, after all, it has been. This, of course, is true. But what a strange argument to use in defence of war! "See how little damage our guns do!" And although I am convinced that they refrain from more serious crime, because their consciences revolt from it, they lay themselves open to the unthinking retort that they only do not do more because they can't; a retort not only untrue, but provocative, to people sufficiently childish to be "dared" into action. What women have to do is to make their demand a formidable demand, and they cannot do this by adopting methods which the enormous mass of women will never whole-heartedly apply. By continued education, by well-considered and thoroughly prepared political action, by constant readiness for negotiation, by taking men always on their best side, and by making the help of women worth having, suffragists will enlist an ever-growing mass of women to hard work and sacrifice, and, what is more, they will convince men of the constructive ability of women, and of the possibility of men and women working together in the future.
In the course of the militant movement, one has seen a vast amount of femininity using the old weapons, which one hopes will be gradually laid aside. Defiance alternating with injured innocence. The smashing of a window by a woman, who cries, when a man apprehends her, "You mustn't touch me! I'm a woman!" The frequent inexcusable untruth that "women are being imprisoned for daring to ask for the vote," and that the Home Secretary is starving women in prison. It would have been too wonderful if women, in their fight for liberty, had proved themselves perfect. We have not. We have shown human foibles, like men, partisanship and violence, like men, and we have shown some faults which, though not specifically feminine, are the faults natural to subjected persons.
When all is said about the mistakes and faults and follies of suffragists, those of the Government have been far greater. They belittled the women's movement, and treated it with the sort of sneering contempt which is more provocative than anything in the world. They magnified the first importunities into crimes. The early militants were treated with monstrous and disproportionate severity, and this contributed largely to their early popularity. They were treated like the worst criminals, for mere impropriety, or for the technical offence of obstruction. They were subjected to the most abominable brutalities when they asked questions at meetings. (It was a most unhappy thought which struck them, when they found out how easy men's nerves and men's passions make it for a woman to break up a meeting.) Two Acts of Parliament and innumerable special orders have been devised to deal with them, and have failed. Everybody with the slightest political insight knows that the reform must come. When Mr. Asquith (House of Commons, 6th May 1913) attempted to define what he meant by a demand for the vote, he said—
"I mean a demand which proceeds from a real, deep-seated, and widely diffused sense of grievance and discontent. I do not think that my honourable Friends will dispute that that is a fair statement of the case. Of course, I do not deny for one moment—who could?—that there are women, and many women in this country, including some of the most gifted, most accomplished, most high-minded of their sex, who do feel in that way. It would be absurd and ridiculous to disguise the facts of the case. So, again, and this is a very serious consideration, it is clear from the phenomena of what is called militancy, to which I am not going to make any further reference, that there are women whose temperaments are such that this same sense of wrong, twisted, perverted, inflamed, as I think in their case it is, the same sense of wrong leads to anti-social courses which men and even women find it difficult to conceive."
This was, in fact, a complete abandonment of the anti-suffrage position, and a recognition that the reform must come, and come soon. If many of the best women feel a real and deep sense of grievance, and if other women are being "twisted, perverted, and inflamed" by this sense of wrong, it is quite plain that it is not statesmanship, still less is it Liberal statesmanship, by delay and coercion to make the sense of grievance more deeply seated and more widely diffused. It is not even humane. For who feels the grievance? Women. And against whom must they feel it? Men. Does any man in his senses wish that the grievance shall be so deeply inbitten that it will take generations to heal? I believe not. I believe too that every bit of work that is done to get the vote ought to be done in such a way as to make the use of the vote run smoothly, when at last it is attained. Militant methods, whether of martyrdom or war, are useless for that.